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Confession: I've never watched Game of Thrones. Well, that's not technically true. I watched the first episode a few years ago, found it mildly entertaining but not terribly gripping, and never watched another one. Life has been fine without it. Several people I know, however, love the show, and that's great, but something I've noticed is that folks really, really don't want episodes of the show spoiled for them. Like, really. Game of Thrones isn't the only program to elicit cries of 'Don't spoil it for me!' from its fans. LOST comes to mind. I actually had someone unfriend me on Facebook because I posted something about a LOST episode a few minutes after it aired. They hadn't watched it yet, and we even got into a discussion about time zones and what not. It was way more intense than it needed to be. On another occasion, a friend chastised me for openly discussing events of The Walking Dead that were six months old. He explained how, given his …

My dad died twenty years ago today.
I didn't think the 20th anniversary of Lewis' death would be anything more than a notation on the calendar, perhaps looming slightly more significant in the mind, given our propensity to fixate on the multiples of five and ten-year milestones. Cue my surprise this morning, when, on the way to work, I was listening a song that -- for whatever reason -- reminds me of dad, and I broke down crying. Had to spend close to ten minutes drying-up in the car before heading to the office. Wore sunglasses, even though it wasn't that sunny outside, to cover the puffy eyes.
This morning, I thought about the concept of stolen time. The idea that someone dies at what we deem to be too young of an age, and how they really should have lived longer. In truth, we all die when our time comes, and it's different for everyone. When someone passes away aged seventy-five or eighty, we rarely think to ourselves how they should have had more years. Lewis was …

"Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting"
- Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House
Thursday, August 3rd, at 9:51pm, I was sleeping. It had been a long day that constituted a segment of an even longer week, thus, an hour or so earlier, I comfortably put head to pillow and entered a period of restfulness. Across town, a 53-year-old man named Gus Edwards was breathing his last breath, the victim of a gunshot wound inflicted earlier in the evening. The dichotomy of these two situations is something that occurs all too often in our world, and will, I fear, continue to do so for as long as humanity resides upon this earth.
There is always a twinge of guilt that occurs whenever I learn of someone's premature death, especially somebody local. Awakening contentedly in my bed that Friday morning and reading the news of Mr. Edwards' death on my phone induced a momentary pang of remorse, coupled with gratitude. Remorse because it felt almost like an affront to having been aliv…